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Chicken Little ‘science’

Cal Thomas is America’s most widely syndicated op-ed columnist, with 540 newspapers in the United States and abroad carrying his column, now syndicated by Tribune Media Services in Chicago. For 16 years his column was distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.He is the author of 10 books, including Blinded by Might: Why the Religious Right Can’t Save America (HarperCollins/Zondervan) and The Wit and Wisdom of Cal Thomas.

The cult centered on “global warming” alarmism is getting hot under the collar. People seem to have stopped paying attention and polls show “climate change” barely registers on a list of voters’ concerns.

This can only mean, as losing politicians like to say, that their message isn’t getting through. What to do? Why shout louder, of course.

A recent story in The New York Times sought to help alarmists raise the decibel level: “The countries of the world have dragged their feet so long on global warming that the situation is now critical, experts appointed by the United Nations reported Sunday, and only an intensive worldwide push over the next 15 years can stave off potentially disastrous climatic changes later in the century.”

I guess we had better get ready for climate Armageddon then because China, one of the world’s worst polluters, is not likely to comply.

The Obama administration and liberal politicians in general seem to promote climate change fiction in order to gain even more dominance over our lives. Apparently controlling one-sixth of the economy through Obamacare isn’t enough for them.

Most of the “reporting” on the subject is decidedly one-sided, including President Obama’s claim in his last State of the Union address that “The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.” Science is never settled, or it wouldn’t be science. It is constantly testing, probing and searching for new information. That’s why science textbooks are regularly revised as new discoveries are made.

The Times story was about a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Berlin. To read it one might think there is unanimity of opinion on the subject by panel members. Maybe that’s true of current members of the panel, but it is instructive to read the comments by former IPCC member Richard Tol, who, among other things, is professor of the Economics of Climate Change, Institute for Environmental Studies and Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

Professor Tol, writes Globalwarming.org, recently “accused the IPCC of being too alarmist about global warming and asked to have his name withdrawn from its recently released Working Group II report (WG2) on climate change impacts.” In a recent article for the Financial Times titled “Bogus prophecies of doom will not fix the climate,” Tol explains why, “Humans are a tough and adaptable species. People live on the equator and in the Arctic, in the desert and in the rainforest. We survived the ice ages with primitive technologies. The idea that climate change poses an existential threat to humankind is laughable.”

German meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls goes further. He has written that contrary to the alarmists’ claims of melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels, the rise in sea levels has declined 34 percent over the last decade. His report, which analyzed satellite data from TOPEX and JASON-1 and JASON-2 missions studying global ocean topography, concluded that the sea level rise has “slowed down significantly,” and that “…it should not be speculated on whether the deceleration in the rise is a trend or if it is only noise. What is certain is that there is neither a ‘dramatic’ rise, nor an ‘acceleration’. Conclusion: Climate models that project an acceleration over the last 20 years are wrong.”

There are plenty of ways to check Puls’ conclusions, including www.climatedepot.com, which provides links to the papers and work of climatologists and other scientists who take a decidedly different position from that of the climate change crowd. Some note the pressure placed on them to conform to the “faith” in order to receive government subsidies and donations from foundations and wealthy individuals.

Climate change is a fact? Don’t think so.

The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, writes, “If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken? … Climate-change proponents have made their cause a matter of fealty and faith. For folks who pretend to be brave carriers of the scientific ethic, there’s more than a tinge of religion in their jeremiads.”

Yet another reason not to trust climate change alarmists.

Cal Thomas’ latest book is “What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America” is available in bookstores now. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.

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